Social & New Media and PR tactics

By Brad Axelrad - Apr 14 , 2010

For man people, social media is like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one can really do anything about it.

Well, sort of. Everyone does talk about it, as if it’s some arcane area of human understanding and strategic communications that only the chosen few (or high school students) can comprehend. And may companies, and individuals, have taken to Tweeting, Facebooking, Google alerting, email blasting, blog-rolling and YouTubing.

But is there a method to this? Or is it a whole lemming thing happening, with everyone jumping over the social media cliff just because they’ve heard that there are riches to be made somewhere out there beyond the horizon.

Well, there has indeed been a big shift in the way we represent ourselves in the world. No doubt about it. The Internet has opened up communication to the personal and the public, and in many areas (such as in the lives of college students) they’ve melded.

In the business world, there’s also been a shift of moving away from the media message from big companies, toward one tailoring a personalized message, in effect niche marketing on a bigger scale. This is being done with more sophistication than in the past. That doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes see through the pitch. We all know how irritating it can be to be sold to, or manipulated into buying something through hypnotic language or other techniques, designed to move you towards action.

Now, I am not saying it is bad to sell anything, or to buy anything. But it’s time to leverage the tools of social media, alongside film and traditional public relations, in a specific way targeted toward today’s market, today’s consumer, today’s digital-savvy techno-literate end user.

At the same time,  many people have not caught on to the way the social media world really works, and need to be brought up to the contemporary age of media in a way that allows them to feel cosseted by the old while they’re being wooed by the new.

The primary focus of this approach is on relationship-building and connecting. Of building tribes of like minded people ready to drive a message home with complete authenticity and transparency.

There is nowhere to hide anymore!  Our lives are exposed, and this is a good thing!  We can leverage the exposure that used to take thousands of marketing dollars….  The world is our oyster and just a click away.

At Prosper Now, we’ve brought together some of the top minds in new and old media, who’ll teach you how to find your place, and execute your strategy, in a way that embraces traditional and nontraditional – and emerging – technologies.